Category: New draft

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 6 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Adlam Gap Analysis
• Hebrew Gap Analysis
• German Gap Analysis
• French Gap Analysis
• N’Ko Gap Analysis
• Osage Gap Analysis

These drafts complement the 21 Gap-analysis documents published last June.

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.

The WG Note, Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages has been republished with a note at the beginning which explains the following:

• the document is now owned solely by W3C, rather than a joint production between W3C and the Unicode Consortium
• the current version of the document is out-of-date, and should be used with care
• a new version is in preparation.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Internationalization Best Practices for Spec Developers.

This document provides a checklist of internationalization-related considerations when developing a specification. Most checklist items point to detailed supporting information in other documents. Where such information does not yet exist, it can be given a temporary home in this document. The dynamic page Internationalization Techniques: Developing specifications is automatically generated from this document.

The current version is still a very early draft, and it is expected that the information will change regularly as new content is added and existing content is modified in the light of experience and discussion.

The Encoding Candidate Recommendation has been updated to take into account changes made to the editor’s draft since its initial publication as a Candidate Recommendation. These changes are largely due to issues discovered during implementation. This is a snapshot of the WHATWG document, as of 29 September 2015 and no changes have been made from the original in the body of the document other than to align with W3C house styles.

If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please raise them as github issues against the latest editor’s draft. Only send comments by email to www-international@w3.org if you are unable to raise issues on github. All comments are welcome.

The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding.

The other (legacy) encodings have been defined to some extent in the past. However, user agents have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification addresses those gaps so that new user agents do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations and existing user agents can converge.

The BPMLOD community group has published three best practices for working with Multilingual Linked Data. The best practices are around bilingual dictionaries, multilingual dictionaries and multilingual terminologies. The BPMLOD group will continue to work on further best practices related to other types of language resources.

Updates to Requirements for Chinese Text Layout include the following.

• Zhuyin figures updated
• Various graphic examples of annotations added
• New section containing examples of Zhuying annotations
• Aijie Zhang added to list of editors
• Various code fixes and typos corrected

We are in the process of adding Simplified Chinese translations of all the text, but the work is still in progress. All markup created during this process so far has been hidden in this document using CSS. It will be unhidden in a future Working Draft, once the work is completed.

A detailed list of changes, including diffs, can be found in the github commit log.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Requirements for Chinese Text Layout (中文排版需求), on behalf of the Chinese Layout Task Force, part of the Internationalization Interest Group.

The document describes requirements for Chinese script layout and text support on the Web and in digital publications. These requirements inform developers of Web technologies such as CSS, HTML, and SVG, and inform browser and tool implementers, about how to support the needs of users in Chinese-speaking communities.

This is still a very early draft and the group is looking for comments and contributions to support the ongoing development of the document.

Changes in this publication of Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography (한국어 텍스트 레이아웃 및 타이포그래피를 위한 요구사항) are editorial in nature, but significant. The separate English and Korean versions of the document were merged into one page. (You can use buttons at the top right of the page to view the document in one language or the other, if you prefer.)

Merging the languages helps significantly for development and maintenance of the document, for guiding users to a language version they prefer, and for bilingual readers offers additional opportunities.

In addition, the links to issues in the document were changed to point to the github issues list, rather than the former Tracker list.

There were no substantive changes to the English (authoritative) version, but the Korean version was brought into line with earlier changes to the English text.

Indic Layout Requirements describes the basic requirements for Indic script layout and text support on the Web and in Digital Publications. These requirements provide information for Web technologies such as CSS, HTML, and SVG about how to support users of Indic scripts. The current document focuses on Devanagari, but there are plans to widen the scope to encompass additional Indian scripts as time goes on.

Changes in the new version relate to initial letter styling in Devanagari text. Editorial changes were also made to bring the document in line with recent changes to the Internationalization Activity publishing process.

Character Model for the World Wide Web: String Matching and Searching builds upon Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals to provide authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers a common reference on string identity matching on the World Wide Web and thereby increase interoperability.

This new version introduces numerous editorial changes as well as replacing some temporary terminology with better terms, and integrating the case folding text from the string matching algorithm into the case folding section. The document template was also adapated to match the new Internationalization publication process. See details of changes.